There is limited time for elementary teacher professional learning in science in order to meet the aspirational goals of current reform efforts. In this study, we investigated what and how teachers learn on-the-job to gain insight into modes of support less often included in teacher education design. Specifically, we studied elementary teachers' participation in a system-level organizational routine: curriculum materials adoption processes (CMAPs). Using a communities of practice framework, we explored teacher learning in a comparative case study of three U.S. school districts' CMAP routines, observing CMAP committee meetings and interviewing participants about their expeirences. We found that what teachers learned varied across each district's CMAP. We argue this variation can be traced to two CMAP features: (1) teachers' use of boundary objects and (2) their boundary spanning roles and structures. Results have implications for the design of educational systems' organizational routines to more intentionally serve a dual role as a professional learning opportunity.

Reforming instruction is challenging. In this comparative case study of 12 school districts, we investigated the dilemmas that emerged for system leaders as they engaged in system building for elementary science and the approaches leaders took in managing them. We found that system leaders' efforts to manage their environments contributed to the preferential treatment of literacy and mathematics relative to science. Leaders managed this dilemma using three strategies: (a) integration of science with other subjects, (b) specialization of teachers, and (c) adopting curriculum materials. This study contributes to literature on dilemma management by showing that dilemmas in education system building are school-subject sensitive, emerge in relation to system building for other subjects, and are embedded in school and education systems' structural/organizational arrangements.

This comparative case study explores how 18 state education agencies (SEAs) support school districts in advancing standards-based elementary science reform. We identify how SEAs understand their work in advancing elementary science reform and describe how SEAs sought to engage districts in bridging from standards to classroom practice. Based on our analysis, we argue that the school subject is a critical explanatory variable in understanding SEA efforts to support standards implementation and SEAs lean on a resource-based approach for instructional policy implementation. This study contributes to the growing research base on the role of state policy in supporting standards implementation.

Purpose: Most empirical work using a distributed perspective to frame research on leadership practice uses the school as the unit of analysis, focusing on how leadership is stretched over people and aspects of the situation within schools. This study investigates leadership practice for elementary science, using a multilevel distributed framework, to understand the interrelationships among educational leaders operating at various levels-from classrooms, to schools, to educational systems, and, beyond, to the educational sector. Research Methods/Approach: Using an embedded, comparative case study design, we analyzed leadership practice for elementary science reform in 13 school districts in the U.S. as leaders worked to bridge from the Next Generation Science Standards learning ideals to classroom instruction. Data collection included interviews, observations, and documents. Findings: Leading elementary science reform involved three core components of leadership practice: (1) garnering attention for science in a situation that prioritized the instruction of English Language Arts and mathematics; (2) cultivating and channeling essential relationships not only within the system but also in the broader education sector to access the resources needed to (re)build an educational infrastructure for elementary science instruction; and (3) supporting the use of educational infrastructure in everyday practice in schools. Implications: This study makes the case for using a multilevel distributed leadership perspective to frame studies of leadership practice to understand how efforts at different levels interact in shaping the practice of leadership.

Calls for evidence-based practice are pervasive. In response, extensive scholarship has employed four categories of research use—instrumental, symbolic, conceptual, and imposed—to examine how research is used in schools and districts. We draw on sociocultural learning theory and empirical data from one school district to newly theorize latent use as another category of research use. We define latent use as when educators participate with a research-embedded tool in ways that guide their work practice. We call this “latent” use because educators use research via their participation with tools embedded with research quotes, citations, and/or summaries rather than directly engaging with traditional research products (e.g., journal articles). We then discuss latent use's potential merits and limitations.

Building on and extending work in the distributed leadership tradition, we sketch and argue for a multilevel distributed perspective on educational leadership. A multilevel distributed framework depicts educational leadership systemically by focusing on how actors and artifacts at multiple levels of an education system interact to constitute the practice of educational leadership on the ground. Our framing goes beyond any one potential source of leadership such as the school, Local Educational Authority, Provincial government, or ministry and also eschews frameworks that simply aggregate different sources of leadership in an educational system. Instead, our multilevel distributed framework centers on how actors and artifacts at different levels of an educational system interact not only within but across levels of the system to constitute leadership practice. In this way, it is more about multiplication than addition. Our framing allows for actors and artifacts interacting differently depending on the educational system and on the particular “national” educational sector in which that system operates and depends on for resources.

We offer a conceptual framework for research use in schools that utilizes an organizational perspective. By organizational, we mean that we consider the complex contexts within which teachers and school leaders work, and how these contexts facilitate and hinder opportunities to use research in decision making. We highlight three school-level factors—authority, status, and organizational routines. We also highlight three district–school arrangements that shape school-level decision making—jurisdiction, routines, and informal social networks.

This article examines how leaders in public, private, and hybrid educational systems manage competing pressures in their institutional environments. Across all systems, leaders responded to system-specific puzzles by (re)building systemwide educational infrastructures to support instructional coherence and framed these efforts as rooted in concerns about pragmatic organizational legitimacy. These efforts surfaced several challenges related to educational equity; leaders framed their responses to these challenges as tied to both pragmatic and moral organizational legitimacy. To address these challenges, leaders turned to an array of disparate government and nongovernment organizations in their institutional environments to procure and coordinate essential resources. Thus, the press for instructional coherence reinforced their reliance on an incoherent institutional environment.

Focusing on primary school principals' espoused strategies for developing social capital over their early years in the principal's office, we show that investing in social capital was a core challenge during their formative years. Based on our analysis of data from a longitudinal study of 35 new principals, we argue that school principals made sense of the social capital challenge in two ways: First, developing their own relationships with key stakeholders such as teachers, parents, and students. Second, working to build and improve relationships among stakeholders, both within and among stakeholder groups (e.g. among teachers, between teachers and students). Further, we argue that school principals reported using a combination of three strategies to address their sense of the social capital challenge - being present by being visible and accessible to stakeholders; building infrastructure to cultivate relations with, within, and among stakeholders; and channeling relationships both with, within, and among stakeholder groups by focusing the nature and/or content of these interactions. Our analysis systematically attends to, the resource(s) that principals hoped to access through their social capital building efforts, the strategies they employed, and the stakeholders they implicated in their efforts.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a reform effort "for states, by states," advances ambitious ideals for elementary science teaching, but the fate of these ideals will depend in part on the engagement of state science coordinators (SSCs). This article explores the responses of SSCs to NGSS in a purposeful sample of 18 US states. Based on analysis of 19 interviews with 22 SSCs, we develop two arguments. First, SSCs' ideas about improving elementary science education converged around three themes: the introduction of three-dimensional science teaching and learning, the integration of engineering with science teaching, and the integration of science with ELA and mathematics. Second, SSCs' sense-making about reforming elementary science education was situated in and shaped by (a) their knowledge of how elementary science instruction has been and continues to be de-prioritized, as well as their experiences (b) facilitating work groups in developing science standards using the Framework for K-12 Science Education, and (c) participating in professional networks.

This chapter provides a model of multilevel distributed leadership in education, which integrates diverse sources of leadership across the education sector, as a tool for improved teaching and supporting equal opportunity. The framework is offered as a response to an environment of narrowing perspectives of learning and educational goals characterised by leadership siloes and increasingly focused on administration and testing. Student learning is both the subject and object of educational leadership. The concept of ‘instructional leadership’ contributed to bringing leadership for teaching more attention in research on school administration. A related part of diagnostic work involves understanding the structure of the social relationships among staff, whether they are personal, professional, or a mix of both. The relationships that support accessing and activating essential resources for teaching don’t happen naturally. The educational sector consists of all organisations engaged in work related to schooling.

This article explores principal sensemaking about their work in the U.S. education sector, as technical rationalization ideas about schooling increasingly inform and guide educational policy and school reform initiatives. Using a sensemaking framework, we explore the process of on the job professional socialization for two cohorts of new principals in one urban education system. Specifically, we examine the core challenges identified by principals over their first five years on the job, paying special attention to the salience and persistence of these challenges over time and surfacing a particular sort of challenge – dilemmas. Our analysis documents how these dilemmas of principals’ practice cannot be solved as they involve roughly equally desirable (or undesirable) alternatives so that choosing one over the other is difficult, if not impossible. Rather, because dilemmas require compromise among alternatives, they have to be managed rather than resolved. Based on our analysis, we argue for attention to dilemma management as a central, if mostly forgotten or ignored, aspect of school principal practice in an era when problem-solving and evidence-based decision-making have come to dominate the discourse about educational leadership.

•School leaders' workspaces are located centrally in school buildings.•School leaders have few opportunities for unplanned encounters with colleagues.•Leaders counter their isolation by maintaining visibility to their colleagues.•School staff travel further in school buildings to seek advice from leaders.

Public school districts have been operating under a decade's long press to move beyond functioning as engines of access-oriented mass public schooling to functioning as instructionally focused education systems pursuing educational excellence and equity. This press has researchers developing analytic frameworks useful for examining different ways that districts are responding. Even so, limitations in individual frameworks suggest a need to explore the coordinate use of complementary frameworks to support more comprehensive examinations of districts. This analysis explores the coordinated use of a "coupling framework" and a "systems framework" to analyze efforts in two districts to improve educational quality and to reduce disparities. Findings suggests that the coordinated use of the coupling and systems frameworks supports deeper analyses of instructional organization and management than either framework would on its own, and that further incorporating quality and equity frameworks would support still-deeper analyses. From the perspective of this issue of the Peabody Journal of Education (PJE), the implication is that elaborating new institutional theory to capture micro-level variation in response to macro-level dynamics is but one challenge faced by organizational researchers in education, and that the deeper challenge lies in considering alternative world views—paradigmatic assumptions—underlying the use of singular and complementary analytic frameworks.